Golly Gee: BioShock And Deus Ex Sure Look Nice In UE4

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Sometimes you want to charge guns, swords, and words a-blazin into a game world and tame the land until Iron Maiden writes a song about you. Other times, you just want to heft your heavy eyelids, sip a light tea, and gently sail through friendly old places made new again. You’ve got a long day ahead of you, but you don’t have to venture out into the cruel sadlands of life just yet. Remember better days. Here, let me help with videos of the original BioShock and Deus Ex: Human Revolution re-realized in Unreal Engine 4. They’re quite a sight.

In both cases, assets and concepts from the original games were given exceedingly thorough Unreal Engine 4 spit ‘n’ shine jobs. The end result is what you see before you. Rapture looks dingier, drearier, and more waterlogged than ever, and Deus Ex is so sterile that I can practically feel the frosty glass stinging my skin.

Graphics! I do like this sort of videogame archaeology, though. Dig up a piece of gaming history, brush it off, and put it on display for all the world to see. Puts the mind in an interesting place, too. In BioShock’s case, we’re looking at a game that – love it or hate it – arose from a very specific set of circumstances, a triple-A publisher putting mega-buck backing behind a fever vision undersea metropolis. Irrational itself is sleeping with the fishes now, and publishers are more cautious than ever with their money. We’ll probably never see anything quite like Rapture’s strange majesty again, feel the way we felt the first time the bathysphere spat us into this corpse of a place. Also, it’s weird to realize that a game released in 2007 now qualifies as nostalgia fodder. Where did the time go, and how can I get it back?

I wouldn’t mind exploring these revisions myself, but I feel like they’d quickly show their seams. Maybe it’s better this way. Or not, but both videos are nice to look at nonetheless. Can’t complain too much about that. Or well, some people can, but it’s just too early for me. I have tea to finish.

And actually, this might be another confirmation of the idea that as graphics technology advances, the brightly-lit and brightly-colored spaces a-la Mirror’s Edge will improve dramatically. I don’t see much improvement in the grime-mold-and-blood-covered Bioshock environment, but the brightly-lit sterile Deus Ex environment looks amazing.

Little known fact: Bioshock is actually on the Unreal Engine 2, albeit a heavily modified version, which was used for UT2k4, not the UE3 like most people think. It’s really impressive that they were able to coax such amazing graphics out of such an old engine.

Yeah. If anything I like the Bioshock one more than the Deus Ex one … surprise it uses more original assets!

Both of these are just … shinier and higher tech. Deus-Ex and Bioshock were absolutely gorgeous games crafted with love and a robust sense of specific atmosphere.

The bio-shock one feels like a decent replica–the shinyness makes it look like a better replica than it is. The Deus-Ex one bears no almost no relation. It looks utterly out of place. I’m not impressed at all; I’ve seen much better re-imaginings and fan-made HD upgrades and whatnot.

It’s worth remembering that sometimes you don’t want things to look hi-fi and/or realistic. Some of the greatest works of art bear no resemblance to reality and make use of lo-fi techniques whether by explicit choice or material/technical/technological limitations. Think of how amazing a lot of concept art looks; it’s the same idea. Limiting the graphical fidelity of a work is not necessarily limiting to the aesthetic product and sometimes it is a boon. I think in Bioshock’s case, there is a point where an upgrade would have been favorable (see: Bioshock: Infinite’s coherent graphical improvements on the Bioshock style). This really doesn’t improve it in the right ways, though; it abandons the style in favor of making it more shiny.

Textures was the biggest issue I had with this. The lighting can be wonderful (too dark to really judge) but the remaining assets just look very aged. Sure there is Vaseline dirty cam, but thats not an improvement imo.

As somebody who still doesn’t know anything about coding, I’m wondering: is it feasible to take the original assets of, say, an UE3 game and use them to rebuild the game in UE4 (thus being able to add 75,2% more shinies)?

I’ll answer this as a non-expert: A part of it, yes, but UE4 doesn’t magically add all the shinies. It might add some, but not all.
Oversimplification:
You have a 1997 Toyota. You paint it with a $2000 paint job. Is it shiny? Yes! But it still doesn’t have the curves of a Ferrari :)

Large part of why these models look as amazing as they do is using different layers of materials, like parallax mapping, specular maps, or all of the UE-specific types of textures. It’ll never be as simple as just taking 3D models and textures from an older game to import them into the new one.

Thanks guys! It’s more or less as I had figured: you need to update the original models and textures and then add more shinies. Though I didn’t know the original assets were much of much higher quality and the ingame ones, interesting.

Really amazingly undewhelmed by the Bioshock one. Possibly because it’s doing everything I thought Bioshock did wrong at higher res; High contrast, punishing shininess and extra lumpy bumpmaps, loads of glare. The texturing’s not up to much either in a lot of places. Flat plain stuff beside very highres stuff next to heavily noised ‘dirty’ stuff.

My theory is that, well, Bioshock was already on a mishmash of Unreal Engine 2.5 and 3, and this just being an updated version of the engine, yeah, it’s not going to look fantastically different apart from the standard improvements.

Same could be said on the differences between Frostbite 2 and 3, as well as Cryengine 2 and 3.

The Deus Ex scene looks great but it leans very heavily on the rough reflection environment stuff in UE4 in a way that probably wont work as well in an actual game. To try to put it non-technically: the reflections are all (laboriously) pre-computed for a couple of choice spots in the room and can therefore only include static geometry. They can’t include doors that move, people, robots and so on.

This is fine if you’re careful, but it can potentially start look really goddamn weird if you go overboard. For instance, if you have a bunch of large tube lights in the ceiling that can’t cast proper shadows and a bunch of prominent metal doors that can’t reflect people standing in front of them

It’s still an excellent demo for what the tech can do (and for Quixel’s materials library, which I guess was its point) but viewers should bear in mind that there’s a huge difference in what you can do with a static scene compared to something that needs to work with dynamic actors. Games cannot do some of that stuff, for good reasons.

I’m pretty sure his scene uses Screen Space Reflections, which obviously reflect characters, as well as everything else. When combined with cubemaps by some shader magic, SSRs are a pretty convincing effect.

Damn, all this reference to Human Revolution as “Deus Ex” with no further qualification is really, really starting to irritate me. Even disregarding the fact that I hold the original to be the best game of all time and HR to be a pale pretender, it just makes reading about the games so, so confusing! I don’t recall this happening with Invisible War. Can we just say DX, IW, and HR? It makes life a lot easier, and you don’t have to type the full title each time.

*Don’t get me started on when publishers themselves do this. Looking at you, Thiaf.

Relax. I assure you even people who liked Human Resources consider it to be the other Deus Ex game that wasn’t the complete utter failure we feared it’d be. We’re just casually referring to it casually as Deus Ex here because it’s obvious we’re not referring to the real Deus Ex. You’re essentially flipping out at people casually talking about an acquaintance named Brian because your father was named Brian and he was a great man and people should always think of him when they say the name Brian.

I don’t know, man. There are lots of Brians around, but only three Deus Ex games (all of which I liked). I guess I’m just a bitter pessimist, but I sometimes see this substitution thing as a kind of hijacking. When people talk about »Thief« in a decade, do you want them to refer to the 2014 version or the original? Especially since the original Thief and Deus Ex are a bit old already, so many people won’t even have played them, and just know the newer incarnations.

Well, maybe the last point is the thing that scares me the most about conflating this stuff. I guess I don’t want people to think that »Thief« is a shit game, and I want them to know the beauty that was the original Deus Ex.

Regardless of the “source content vs. have they made it better” argument, there are some stunning FX on show there, notably the use of global illumination in the Deus Ex scenes.

Let’s hope that developers aren’t afraid to use all these features in their games (appropriately, of course) and don’t hold back because enabling them causes poor performance on crappy Xbox ones and PS4s.

Exciting times ahead for sure. Those minor details on the ground (like scratches and stuff) and tubes in the DeusEx video (doesn’t really look like DEX at all tbh.) give the room much more character (for lack of a better word). Can’t wait. But let’s not fall back into the early days of UE3, where really everything had been coated with a thick layer of vaseline. Remember Me uses the UE really well, for example, with none of that silliness.

I would love to play the original Deus Ex in a modern engine like UE4 or Cry Engine 3 – in fact, I would pay the standard $50 for it. *sigh* Honestly, redoing Deus Ex in a modern engine would probably be a better use of resources than doing Deus Ex Online – you know they’re working on it.

I played the same game again lots of times, just because I got a new CPU or GPU, or it was ported to a new engine, or it got better textures… Just for the gore of seeing it with better graphics.

I still would play again Doom II or Tomb Raider I with this new engine.

But I would not play again Bioshock, or Dead Space just to see how it looks on this engine, which by the way still shows some curved surfaces broken with triangles (the lamp border on Bioshock looked made by right lines instead of a curve).
But even if it were flawless, is not compelling enough.

I would play again Bioshock or Dead Space, if I were promised that this time I would be able to break any wall, and find new rooms, and it would not have unmovable boxes apparently made of indestructible concrete, furniture apparently nailed to the floor… Or If I could find new ways of hypnotizing a big daddy to lead him to another big daddy and make them fight to dead.

I would play again Dead Space, if it included a weaponless mode, were I could set traps, and use strategy,. like closing a door by remote control, to kill a passing necromorph.
I would play it again if I could find dogs in the way, and have the objective of saving the maximum quantity of dogs, escorting them to the end of the game. Or if objects were not dissapearing when I cross a door. I remember that I was carrying an explosive barrel, and it dissapeared suddenly, breaking my plan to accumulate enough of explosives to kill many monsters and saving bullets. I would love to cut a hole in a wall, to safely shoot the enemy across the hole.